Common fear putting brakes on success

One common fear is behind the majority of business leaders not achieving their goals, according to a business coach and author.

“I think the biggest common factor that we all have is fear. And ultimately the fear of death is the thing that frightens the hell out of most people,” said Rand Leeb-du Toit of EXOscalr.

“Once you can help people understand how they relate to death and what it means to them, how they situate themselves, and how they can overcome that fear and harness the energy that that’s giving them for positive change, that’s a fantastic thing.”

A common problem for many people in business, he said, is to confuse the fear of physical death with other kinds of death – death of dreams, failure of a business and so forth.

Rand, who had to overcome his own fears following a near-death experience three years ago, said such confusion of what people are ultimately afraid of can have a paralysing effect.

“What I find often is that people confuse what it is that they’re doing with what it is that they should be doing. And when you have some kind of a transformative trigger take place, whether, like in my case, a sudden cardiac death experience, something that will really get you to sit up and take notice and go, ‘Wow. Am I doing what I should be doing in life?’, that can be such a profound and transcending moment for people, to come to terms with the fact that what I thought I was doing was everything, is actually nothing. It means nothing,” he said.

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“When I’m standing on the sideline of my kid’s rugby match and some of the other parents turned to me and say, ‘Hey. What is it that you do?’ It’s not so much about that role that you have in some corporate situation. It’s what is it that you do inside yourself. That’s what really counts at the end of the day.”

Hear more insights from Rand, including his near-death experience and what it helped teach him about life and goal-setting, on the My Business Podcast.